Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip are today visiting Jamestown, Virginia, the site of the first permanent English settlement in the New World.

Jamestown was named after Queen Elizabeth’s ten-times great-grandfather, King James I of England and VI of Scotland.

Ironically, the fledgling colony survived and prospered primarily through the cultivation of tobacco, which James utterly abhored. In 1604, three years before the colony’s founding, the dyspeptic monarch penned his famous “Counterblaste to Tobacco”, in which berated his subjects for their enthusiastic consumption of this new-found noxious weed.

Short-sighted in many ways, James was curiously prescient on the dangers of smoking. He denounced it as “loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.”

He was even canny enough to see the health hazard of inhaling second-hand smoke. He wrote: “Is it not both great vanity and uncleanness that at the table, a place of respect, of cleanliness, of modesty [that] men should not be ashamed to sit tossing of tobacco pipes and puffing of the smoke of tobacco one to another, making the filthy smoke and stink thereof to exhale athwart the dishes and infect the air, when very often men that abhor it are at their repast.”

James has his faults as a monarch, but he also had his good points. He reigned for 22 years without ever going to war, which meant that his subjects enjoyed a prolonged period of peace, prosperity and low taxes. In addition to authorizing the founding of Jamestown, James also commissioned the version of the Bible that bears his name, and even today outsells all competing versions. Finally, James can be claimed as the first champion of smoke-free environments.

Not a bad showing for a king once derided as “the wisest fool in Christendom.”